Mourning in America

I do want to write something about the Occupy Wall Street movement but it's taking some time to get my thoughts together, so this is just a quick post on the outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs.

I'm not really bothered either way about Apple as a company. They make some good products--Kate has an iPhone and iPad which I enjoy tinkering with--but after some bad experiences with an iMac back in the day I've never wanted one for myself. I'm certainly a bit turned off by the cultlike attitude of some Apple users, but the devices are smart and do merit a degree of devotion.

What I'm more struck by is the way Jobs' death has become an occasion for an outpouring of mass grief. It reminds me of the death of Princess Diana in the UK, or Steve Irwin in Australia; further afield, the British public's mourning of Princess Charlotte in 1817, or the Chinese commemoration of Hu Yaobang that sparked the Tiananmen Square protests.

All these seem to be great collective rituals that mark not so much the life of an individual, as the moment when a nation swings about some real or perceived historical fulcrum.

So Diana's death, and Princess Charlotte's, were about a desire to cast off aspects of a certain hierarchical, dour quality in the British establishment; Irwin's was a wake for a larrikin Australia as it receded from the reality of an increasingly slick, metropolitan country. Hu's death, like that of Tunisia's Mohamed Bouazizi earlier this year, marked a culmination of popular frustration with a repressive society.

In that sense, what meaning are people drawing from Steve Jobs' death? My guess is that the mourning here is for the passing of a certain vision of America that never quite existed, though perhaps should have. Here was a figure for both sides of the culture wars, an unabashed former member of the counterculture who was also CEO of the world's second-biggest listed company. An entrepreneur and a manufacturer, at a time when America is worried it is running out of both. An American whose products have become world-leaders, at a time when America is losing its global leadership. Someone whose company has grown while America's economy has stuttered, and who seemed to be winning rather than losing from his relationship with China.

I don't think that's at all a complete portrait of the man. He was also a tyrannical control freak who cancelled Apple's philanthropic programmes when he took over in 1997, denied the paternity of his daughter in a particularly shifty way, bullied and alienated his colleagues, showed little interest in the string of suicides and poor conditions at his supplier Foxconn, and deployed armies of copyright lawyers to tie up his competitors in often-spurious courtroom battles. But an image is already being created to suit the myth.

That's really not meant to denigrate the man; merely to take him off the pedestal onto which, post-mortem, he's being hoisted. Like most hugely successful people, he had a mixture of good and bad qualities, and was fortunate enough to find a concordance between the single-minded pursuit of his own interests and the desires of a broader public. But before we start seeking our salvation by turning him into a sort of secular saint, maybe we should start looking to the ways we can help ourselves without the intercession of the faithful departed.